Terry’s Worklog

“Last Mile” Problem:

• Libraries are better at description than delivery
• We’ve rested on our past successes (library automation, conversion)
• Too many clicks — it takes too many clicks to get users from the search to the digital resources.  (one click to search, one click to get)

Roy makes a great point.  In demonstrating how many clicks it takes to get to full text items within his own organization’s system — he notes that his organization, like others are limited by the vendor software that they use.  However, he doesn’t put the blame on the vendors alone.  He says that we all own the problem — and I agree.  I’ve said this for some time — the problem that we currently have with vendors is one of our own creation.  As an Innovative Interfaces library, I feel like we have outgrown this system some time ago because of their failure to offer solutions for users that want to move outside of their blackbox solution.  However, I recognize that we created this beast.  Libraries have in the past (and for some reason, continue to request) demanded this type of development path from our vendors.  It always surprises me when any library moves to Innovative, but in talking to people, I still find that there is a large segment of the population that is simply looking for black box solutions.

Roy also brings up another good point.  Services exist to help make users lives and experiences easier — to some degree — its up to libraries to simply start taking advantage of them.  I’d argue also that libraries also need to start building their own services to surface their own information within other webservices and take better advantage of the metadata and data available within their own system (or build new systems).

–TR

Ha.  Dan called me on it yesterday after finally posting a link to some pictures from my Readex trip.  One conference behind…Ugh.  Like many, I’m in Ottawa right now hanging out with our cool neighbors to the north and some carpetbaggers from the south playing at hackfest and checking out some presentations with a very international flavor.  I need to catch up.  Fortunately, Roy’s going to be speaking soon, so that should give me  a chance to catch up on email and get caught up on a few posts. (I’m joking of course…maybe. )

–TR

So I got a quick email from someone that attended the Readex conference and they let me know that they had posted some pictures onto flickr.  So if you haven’t visited chestire, VT, here you go.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=readex

–TR

Updated: Apparently Live writer truncated my links. I’ve fixed them.

Terry Reese, Oregon State University

Sorry, no picture and yes, I gave a talk at the Readex conference as well.  I thought it was fairly well received given the topic — though I think it surprised folks as well.  Lots of fun though.  Key quotes from my talk:

• Metadata wants to be free…free the metadata
• Libraries == middleware

I recorded my talk, so if anyone has ~50 minutes to kill, they can listen to it from here: http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/dspace/handle/1957/3134

Or, if you want, you can read a quick summary from Vika Zafrin’s blog at: http://wordsend.org/archives/2006/10/06/readex-ree….  I took a quick look at it and it pretty much covers the basics.

–TR

Vika Safrin, Brown University

Vika discussed a project that was very unfamiliar with — apparently, the Virtual Humanities Lab was a two year project supported by the NEH between 04 and 06 to create a platform for collaborative humanities research.  I’d talked with Vika about this project a little bit after her talk.  The project is an interesting one.  The project resulted in the creation of a web portal that includes a number of early modern Italian texts with ability to annotate and edit elements of these texts within a collaborative environment.  As described, the project sounded like a wikipedia equivalent to collaborative research — very interesting but I’m a sucker for anything that uses TEI (we don’t get to use TEI at OSU). 

Project Homepage: http://golf.services.brown.edu/projects/VHL/index….

–TR

Ed Redmond, LC

Ed talked about the current digitization program being used in the LC map reading room.  He then looked at some of the research that can now be done because of the items currently digitized.

Something interesting — these are research quality scans — which the idea being that once digitized, these items will never be pulled for reference again.  Another interesting thing — Ed had mentioned that LC, since starting map digitization, had digitized some 10,000 maps in the past 10 or so years.  However, they acquire close to 70,000 maps a year.  I’m not a math wiz, but looking at those numbers simply shows how much content simply isn’t be digitized.

Also, Ed talked about maps that are actually created by the LC maps room.  This was something I was aware of.  When I visited the LC about two years ago, one of the things that I had an opportunity to see was the GIS lab in the Map room where LC creates custom maps for Congress on a number of topics.  At the time, I was told that LC couldn’t make those generated maps available because of the sensitivity of the requests.  However, Ed seemed to indicate that LC is looking at ways to overcome some of the privacy issues currently keeping these maps from circulation.  And they are at this point out of circulation.  He’d noted afterwards, that even though LC creates the maps and keeps a digital copy of the GIS project — the library itself, doesn’t archive a copy of the generated map.  In only exists within the archives of the laboratory.  Interesting…

Ed also showed off a number of interesting maps from the reading room.  He was kind enough to give me a copy of his presentation.  See below.

• Slides (ppt)

–TR

Mary Molinaro, University of Kentucky

Mary Molinaro discussed how the University of Kentucky Libraries is leveraging existing resources and securing new ones to build a digital program and become a leader in film-to-digital conversion.  Mary makes some very important points, the first one being that institutions must change the vocabulary in how we discuss our digital projects, i.e., that your library must get away from talking about digitization as a project and as a program.  There must be a recognition by the institution that digitization is part of an institutions core library services and allocate resources and staff accordingly.

Project vs. Program

• Stop thinking about things as projects — but rather as programs (meaning money, infrastructure, etc).

 Mary’s talk centered around how they were able to leverage their participation in the NDIIP newspaper project to secure additional resources for their own inhouse digitization work and lessons that they learned.

–TR 

Matthew Beacom, Yale

RDA will be:

• Multinational content standard providing bibliographic description and access for a variety of media and formats collected by libraries today.
• Developed for use in English language environment; it can also be used in other language communities.
• Independence of format (i.e., like MARC21)
• Will support FRBR tags
• Enable users of library catalogs, etc., to find and user resources appropriate to their information needs.

Who develops and supports RDA:

• ALA CC:DA, ACOC, BL, CCC, CILIP, LC, etc.

“New” Part A (formally part I) for RDA:

1. Introduction
2. General Guidelines for resource description
3. Identification of the resource
4. Technical description — FRBR “Select”
5. Content description — FRBR “Select”
6. Terms of availability — FRBR “Obtain”
7. Item specific information (Now sprinkled through the proposal)

Chapters 6-7 — FRBR Find

• Relationships between FRBR and Group 1
  • works
  • expressions
  • manifestations
  • items
• Relationships between FRBR Group 1 and Group 2 entities
  • persons
  • corporate bodies
  • families

“New” Part B

• General guidelines for Access point control
• Authorized forms
• Variant forms

Some “big issues”

• Its a compromise between AACR2 and what’s new.
  • Means compatibility is important
  • needed to maintain international agreements
• Content vs. display
  • RDA will be a content, not display standard
• Transcription
  • How important is data transcription to record identification?

Questions:

How many countries are involved in the RDA development?
US, Canada, UK and Australia.

–TR

Helen Aguera, National Endowment for the Humanities

Mark Sweeney, Library of Congress
National Digitial Newspaper program:  enhancing access to America’s newspapers
 

NEH

Future directions:

1. NEH will only be making one award per state, looking for collaborative partnerships
2. Projects should
   1. Have an advisory board
   2. Represent the diversity of the state
   3. Will consider “orphan titles”
   4. Will cover costs for digitization, selection and delivery of information to LC

Preservation:

Guiding Principles:

• Aggregate, serve, and preserve
• Consistent with missions and philosophies of NEH and LC
  • Open and perpetual access to the general public and scholarly community
  • Take care to preserve the assets the NDNP builds
  • Must demonstrate good use of taxpayer $
• System is open
  • freely available
  • available to use/re-use
  • delinking/persistent identification
  • etc.
• Practical Concerns
  • Out-of-the-box solutions have preservation challenges
  • Analyze technical options
    • Think carefully about formats
    • details specifications
    • etc.
  • Build on LC Expertise
  • Expect to learn from awardees

Mark Sweeney also provided some slides showing what the new UI for the newspapers would look like.  For those interested, see below:

• Mark Sweeney: (ppt)

August Imholtz, Readex
Kolakowski’s “What the past is for”: a reflection on the irreality of the past and its consequences in the digital world

August provided a philosophical discussion of Kolakowski’s lecture, “What the past is for” (http://www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/kluge-prize-speech.html).  The talk was a discussion of history and the idea that there is no historical truth, only interpreted events.  It was a fun talk to listen to — but one that  I’ll admit I’d have a difficult time putting into words.  Had I been on the ball, I would have simply recorded it because it was I think an appropriate way to start the institute.  I’ve attended this institute over the last two years (this being my third) and one thing that I have found is that our work in libraries seems to be a product of interpretation.  How do we interpret our place within this new digital reality — what do we see as our user communities, how do we deal with the varied forms of metadata and digital media.  We live in a changing world filled with different perspectives and goals.  So onward.

–TR